New French AI Copyright Law Would Effectively Tax AI Companies, Enrich Collection Societies
from the how-very-french dept
This blog has written a number of times about the reaction of creators to generative AI. Legal academic and copyright expert Andres Guadamuz has spotted what may be the first attempt to draw up a new law to regulate generative AI. It comes from French politicians, who have developed something of a habit of bringing in new laws attempting to control digital technology that they rarely understand but definitely dislike.
There are only four articles in the text of the proposal, which are intended to be added as amendments to existing French laws. Despite being short, the proposal contains some impressively bad ideas. The first of these is found in Article 2, which, as Guadamuz summarises, “assigns ownership of the [AI-generated] work (now protected by copyright) to the authors or assignees of the works that enabled the creation of the said artificial work.” Here’s the huge problem with that idea:
How can one determine the author of the works that facilitated the conception of the AI-generated piece? While it might seem straightforward if AI works are viewed as collages or summaries of existing copyrighted works, this is far from the reality. As of now, I’m unaware of any method to extract specific text from ChatGPT or an image from Midjourney and enumerate all the works that contributed to its creation. That’s not how these models operate.
Since there is no way to find out exactly who the creators are whose work helped generate a new piece of AI material using aggregated statistics, Guadamuz suggests that the French lawmakers might want creators to be paid according to their contribution to the training material that went into creating the generative AI system itself. Using his own writings as an example, he calculates what fraction of any given payout he would receive with this approach. For ChatGPT’s output, Guadamuz estimates he might receive 0.00001% of any payout that was made. To give an example, even if the licensing fee for a some hugely popular work generated using AI were €1,000,000, Guadamuz would only receive 10 cents. Most real-life payouts to creators would be vanishingly small.
Article 3 of the French proposal builds on this ridiculous approach by requiring the names of all the creators who contributed to some AI-generated output to be included in that work. But as Guadamuz has already noted, there’s no way to find out exactly whose works have contributed to an output, leaving the only option to include the names of every single creator whose work is present in the training set – potentially millions of names.
Interestingly, Article 4 seems to recognize the payment problem raised above, and offers a way to deal with it. Guadamuz explains:
As it will be not possible to find the author of an AI work (which remember, has copyright and therefore isn’t in the public domain), the law will place a tax on the company that operates the service. So it’s sort of in the public domain, but it’s taxed, and the tax will be paid by OpenAI, Google, Midjourney, StabilityAI, etc. But also by any open source operator and other AI providers (Huggingface, etc). And the tax will be used to fund the collective societies in France… so unless people are willing to join these societies from abroad, they will get nothing, and these bodies will reap the rewards.
In other words, the net effect of the French proposal seems to be to tax the emerging AI giants (mostly US companies) and pay the money to French collecting societies. Guadumuz goes so far as to say: “in my view, this is the real intention of the legislation”. Anyone who thinks this is a good solution might want to read Chapter 7 of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available), which quotes from a report revealing “a long history of corruption, mismanagement, confiscation of funds, and lack of transparency [by collecting societies] that has deprived artists of the revenues they earned”. Trying to fit generative AI into the straitjacket of an outdated copyright system designed for books is clearly unwise; using it as a pretext for funneling yet more money away from creators and towards collecting societies is just ridiculous.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. Originally posted to WalledCulture.
Filed Under: ai, collection societies, copyright, creativity, france, tax
Comments on “New French AI Copyright Law Would Effectively Tax AI Companies, Enrich Collection Societies”
'Learned your art style by copying artist X's? Guess who owns your stuff now?'
Ah good old legalized extortion rackets…
Next on the docket: Any story, song or film created is the property of the owner of the inspiring source material because building upon what came before is theft in france and it will not stand!
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I assume French politicians will personally be paying a tax for the use of this idea.
/s
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Good to see AI and it’s defenders have something in common; neither of them exhibit the ability to comprehend information
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I mean, the defenders sure seem able to comprehend information just fine. Those who try to make it copyright infringement, though…
So it is private copying levy, AI instead of music recording devices
In case you didn’t know, it is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy but AI instead.
Perfect
This way when AI becomes sentient it will aim it’s ire at collection societies first.
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Why would AI care about taxes humans have to pay?
Hey, why differentiate between AI and human [French] authors at all? If you, as a modern author, were inspired by the works of Jules Verne,or rather more modern authors, why not have everything “new” essentially given to prior (even dead) authors as their “right” …eh?
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This. It’s probably part of the future plan, really.
“What’s that note stuck to your fridge? Well, you can’t prove you grew up in a complete vacuum, so pay me.”
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No, the plan is to replace all creative workers with AI in order to maximise the flow of derivative drivel without those writers, actors, directors, editors and musicians getting in the way of the profits.
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Because AI is being developed by companies with lots of money and some authors think that any use of their work entitles them to more money, especially is the using entity has more money than they do.
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want to eat semi-regularly and live indoors
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And if the authors think that the copyright entities are the people to throw their faith in, they’re going to be sorely disappointed.
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Since you learned to do your job from someone, why should you be paid to do it?
I’m just amazed that it took us creating robots to defeat copyright law.
Keep in mind that robots were originally designed to do jobs that humans would find too dangerous or monotonous to do otherwise. Infringers are thought of as thieves, having broken a moral law concerning taking someone else’s property, interdicted by the religions and governments of the world since Moses. Yet no matter what a judge says, there is no theft of an idea which could exist infinitely, just more of that idea, not less.
So the use of an amoral robot, who doesn’t know good or evil, can’t ever be arrested, and is just a passive instrument in art creation makes perfect sense to defeat copyright
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Copyright isn’t about ideas, it is about money. I wonder how much Dickens would have written if he wasn’t being paid.
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Which is its ultimate weakness, make art for the sheer joy of self expression, know that you could be arrested for it, but that won’t stop you
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Yeah, who needs food and clothing?
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That argument won’t suddenly entitle you to sue the innocent, mate.
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I mean, Dickens was literally paid per word, which led to such things as pondering the origins of the phrase “dead as a doornail” for a page and a half with no payoff right after the first sentence.
Funny Lawmakers
Lawmakers response to generative AI is so mind-bogglingly stupid that it looks like I’m living in a satirical universe. Their response is looking more and more like thought control.
Well, this always has been the main reason to regulate technology in France. More cash for theses greedy societies (SACEM, SACD, etc.). When you buy a USB key, there a tax because you could put (even legal) downloaded music on it, so you wouldn’t buy the CD (the laws haven’t changed much since 90s).
In a naive way, this makes some sense. If you ask an AI: “Generate me lyrics on some subject like an Edith Piaf song”, the lyrics are credited to Edith Piaf, because you’ve explicitly ask for it.
In the real word, Guadumuz has explained exactly what would be wrong with this law, and so, why it will certainly pass.
Yeah, uh… anyone remember HADOPI? Anyone remember how much money actual content creators made from that trainwreck?
Any content creator who thinks that this taxation is going to trickle down to them is genuinely kidding themselves. What happened with HADOPI is proof that organizations purporting to stand up for smaller artists and collect money on their behalf, as a rule, cannot be trusted.
just wait
AI will create it’s own legal tax loop hole to avoid this, and all other taxes…just wait
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AI can’t successfully contest a parking ticket, it’s not going to manage tax law
Definition
I bet whatever definition uses is REAL generic and would allow for scope creep. Also this will get people to stop calling their tools AI.
Man, if you think movies are good now that three companies are making most of them, wait until they’re all using the same AIs to write, direct, act, and edit them.
Yet another LLM powered spambot.